Are Red Sox Fans Absolved?

Let us just flip this one last car...

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The Red Sox won the World Series last night. I stopped telling people I was a Red Sox fan a few years ago for the same reasons a guy trying to buy lunch in Kabul tells people he's from Canada, or preemptively rips out his voice box to prohibit confrontation.

It wasn't worth it. I was tired of apologizing for five years of insufferability. The whole state at some point came together and said, "You know what? I think we should all start acting like Ben Affleck's character in 'Good Will Hunting' for a half-decade."

I was not there for this. I would've told them that they got the wrong thing out of that movie.

How? How have we won? Why is everyone okay with this? I'm asking because I need your honesty to improve what we've got, sweetheart.

Granted, we were trying to rein it in a little last year. That's when our team was run by a muppet with blinders on who was managing a pitching staff that hated pitching. The Red Sox came in last place. We did some crow-eating. It tasted horrible.

Then we were gifted this beautiful team full of scrappy players and no expectations. The left side of the field was a mess. There was a platoon in left field. There was a platoon behind the plate. There should've been a platoon at shortstop. There was a 21-year-old playing third base for most of the playoffs.

But that's not enough. It shouldn't be, at least. We did a public victory lap from 2007 to 2013. UrbanDictionary's listing for "Red Sox Fans," written in 2006, starts with this sentence: "Red Sox fans are the most pathetic, whiny, and horrible pieces of shit on the planet Earth."

What changed? Is America nicer? Are they scared we're going to do something terrible to someone they love? Is America politely, confusedly sitting, waiting for an explanation for this behavior?

I'll try to explain it. It will not work.

The definable trait of this whole city is cold. Your identity is constructed by six months of slush and ice and snow, and your ability to not die or kill someone in that time period. That's the objective. Almost everything that's said or done is affected by the upcoming crush of the chill.

People from Massachusetts only reproduce by accident, trying to create warmth between two FUBU jackets in bars throughout the North Shore. It's a big circle of struggle and pain that restarts around this time every year when everybody goes back to Marshalls to buy a FUBU jacket in a different color. It is a patently unwinnable situation.

But when somebody you know does win something? It's a triumph. It's a triumph only properly expressed by the sentence, "Time to flip over and burn this Honda Accord!"